Things are done differently in the world of blockchains and decentralized finance. And they offer a vision of what all careers and corporations could look like one day.
The Crypto Future of Work
In the future, you’ll work with people you don’t know, on projects you can’t control, based on contracts you didn’t sign, financed by people who aren’t actual investors. You’ll pay to work and get paid to do things that were previously considered leisure.
Things are done differently in the world of blockchains and decentralized finance. And they offer a vision of what all careers and corporations could look like one day. You don’t need to own $BTC, $ETH, $UNI, $SOL, or $DOT to learn from these “entities.” And whether you’re a crypto investor or not, new ways of working and incorporating will affect your career, business, and investment portfolio. To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in crypto, but crypto is interested in you.
Below is a superficial survey of the characteristics and consequences of some of the most exciting crypto projects. I tried to start at a familiar point and dive more deeply into less conventional territory as the piece progresses. Keywords are highlighted in bold and include an emoji for ease of reference.
No Offices
Some of the most important projects in the crypto space are developed by ? remote and partly remote teams. This includes platforms, tools, and protocols such as Uniswap, AAVE, MetaMask, Maker, Polkadot, Solana, and Ethereum used by tens of millions of people and process billions in transactions each day.
These projects are wholly or partly ? open-source, meaning their source code can be reviewed and edited by anyone. Some are structured as foundations that do not own the source code but are tasked with maintaining it and nurturing a community of paid and volunteer contributors.
Since the work is done remotely and is coordinated by algorithms, a lot of it also tends to be done ⏰ asynchronously. People complete their tasks at different times instead of all working together during the same hours.
Remote work comes naturally to many crypto teams because the products and protocols they develop are ? decentralized. The original Bitcoin white paper popularized the idea of a payment system that operates without a central trusted authority. In such a system, multiple computers (nodes) in various locations participate in the processing and validating of information.
